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Hispanic American Historical Review 84.1 (2004) 1-4



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Seeing History

Fernando Coronil


I believe these three essays offer, individually and collectively, a significant contribution to a much-needed examination of the role of images in the making of collective identities and national imaginaries in Latin America. The authors, sensitive to the multiple meanings of cultural artifacts, interpret these images by placing them in the context of their production and circulation, as well as in dialogue with other practices and discourses. While the essays focus on the cultural functions of photographs in Latin America, they contribute to an expanding interdisciplinary discussion on the role of visuality in social life that counters the pervasive logocentric bias that has afflicted social analysis. Treating imagery as a distinct semantic field, the essays contribute to overcoming the pervasive split between image and word in Western theory. 1 They also make evident the need to advance toward a more holistic understanding of the role of all the senses in the construction of reality. 2 Challenging logocentrism does not entail the impossible task of avoiding words in analysis; rather, it requires that we use them as signs that do not colonize social reality but instead traffic across the different sensorial and semantic fields that constitute it.

The essays trace the social life of different types of photos in Argentina, Mexico, and Guatemala. In "Family Photos, Oral Narratives, and Identity Formation: The Ukrainians of Berisso," Daniel James and Mirta Zaido Lobato examine personal snapshots of Ukrainian immigrants to Argentina and argue that, in conjunction with oral narratives, these photos helped sustain their identities by linking the privately familiar to the publicly national. In "An Image of 'Our Indian': Type Photographs and Racial Sentiments in Oaxaca, 1920-1940," Deborah Poole analyzes type photographs from postrevolutionary Mexico [End Page 1] that celebrated the unity in diversity of Oaxacans. She suggests that they sustained a plural conception of collective identity that stood in conflict with an alternative vision of national identity that was to be constructed as homogeneously mestizo. In "Can the Subaltern Be Seen? Photography and the Affects of Nationalism," Greg Grandin interprets a large collection of portraits of K'iche' Mayans taken by a single photographer. He identifies a complex and multiaccented language of identity that helped shape an alternative nationalism based on the regeneration of Mayan culture in highland Guatemala.

Before the tremendous power of images, the articles collectively seem disposed to follow Poole's examination of photos as "sedimentations" or "materializations" of discourses of ethnic, racial, and national identity. Grandin's epigraph is a quote from Poole about the ability "that both visual ideologies and visual technologies have to sediment and materialize the abstract and frequently contradictory discourses of racial, ethnic, and class identity that crisscross our own lives as they do those of the photographer's Andean subjects." The articles recognize that visual texts, as James and Lobato suggest, also inform and sustain discourses and practices of multiple identities. Images do not simply reflect identities, but help constitute them. The three essays confirm the central insight of Trachtenberg's landmark Reading American Photographs: "Photographs are not simple depictions, but constructions." As such, "the history they show is inseparable from the history they enact." 3

The authors negotiate this tension between the reflective and performative roles of images by attending to their distinct social biographies. Photographic types are part of public contests over identity, and their meanings can be encountered in this larger field. Studio portraits follow international standards but reveal local specificities through their appropriations and transculturations. Snapshots, like most candid photographs, are forged in idiosyncratic private domains, which in turn are shaped by culturally specific understandings of the private. These essays reveal not just what, but how, photos show what they show. While visual perception is ultimately personal, the organization of perception is public; the traffic in images takes place through multiple visual conventions and different intensities of public control.

In different ways, these articles do not so much see photos as seethrough them. Treating them less as mirrors of history than as windows into it, they offer us glimpses into struggles...

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